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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

> EU countries approve 2035 phaseout of CO2-emitting cars

That's quite a misleading headline from Reuters - they're not phasing out C02 emitting cars, they're banning sale of new CO2 emitting cars. Existing CO2 cars will continue to be legal, although probably become much more expensive to run than electric cars, and of course could be outlawed by further legislation.

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Which is effectively a phase-out of most CO2 emitting cars by 2050, if the ban doesn't change people's purchasing patterns (which it will, but it's hard to tell how)

I didn’t need to read the article to know they meant new cars.

We’ve been discussing this for several years and not once has anyone said we are going to scrap existing vehicles.

I agree, but just as an optimistic counterpoint: It seems like we might be lucky enough to get quickly to a point where recycling perfectly good ICE cars to make EVs will be the smart move for the consumers pocket and the planet.

Theres not much point in talking about it while everyone is still making up lies about running out of lithium, barcoding poor people and eating bugs, but the cleaner air, demand response benefits, reduced imports of fuel, and superior experiemce seems likely to overtake the natural aging out of existing cars as it accelerates over the next decade.

At a certain point, fuelling an ICE car simply wont make sense, just as working coal plants are closing because the coal fuel costs more than building new renewables.

Coal usage is at an all time high.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-coal-cons...

It is 25% of global emissions. We’ve had 50 years to deal with this. Coal is such a dirty source of power. I’ve been told renewables are competitive for at least a decade. Something doesn’t add up.

Renewables have big upfront costs.

This has a few effects, a key one being that stable countries with low cost of capital can lead on deployments.

They first displace new builds, then later they close existing plants.

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

As your article says:

> The world is close to a peak in fossil fuel use, with coal set to be the first to decline, but we are not there yet," said Keisuke Sadamori, the IEA’s director of energy markets and security.

Such optimism.

It’s 50 years later. Half a century!

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

coal is such a dirty source of power, we’d want to eliminate it even if it didn’t cause climate change.

We could definitely have done better, but if I was one of those weird Marvel comic aliens judging the human race we're looking likely to scrape a C on climate change, which is nice. Lots of good work by a lot of people involved. Sadly a lot of it was effort spent on combating lies and stupidity, which drags down our score, but such is life.

Hopefully we'll have learned some lessons for the next global challenge we face.

Yes, I have learned my lesson. Next time I hear an optimist feed me a bunch of bs, i’m going to explain that they’re completely wrong, and people should hold the “optimists” just as accountable as the climate deniers.

Time to admit you were wrong. Being wrong has a huge price.

They are already much more expensive to run.

I replaced a 2003 Saab with a Tesla Model 3 and for our driving (about 40k km per year) the price difference between electricity and petrol ALONE makes up for the leasing payments.

That appears to be not that fuel efficient, though, right? For instance, a 2020 Honda Fit will do 36MPG [0], meanwhile a 2003 Saab would do around 20MPG [1]. Depending on where you live and the usage of your car, I can imagine electric cars being much cheaper overall, even though the starting price can be much higher. I should note I live in a Third World country where electric cars basically don't exist yet, so I'm not aware of the day-to-day realities of using electric cars.

[0]: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2020_Honda_Fit.shtml

[1]: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymake/Saab2003.shtml

Saab is weird, it has really bad fuel economy in the city ~12L/100km but on the highway it's alright, around 7L/100km which is not great but not far off from modern cars.

My wife has to travel about 360km round trip between cities, which with the current fuel prices is at least 50EUR. Same trip with the Tesla costs usually around 3 EUR when charging at home during the cheap hours at night and has never cost more than ~15EUR even during the crazy electricity prices and/or fast charging.

40k km a year? That's a lot of driving, 200+km every workday! Good for you but the EU average is 11.300km.

The title is not misleading at all, as a phaseout is not a ban, but a gradual transition. And as the lifetime of cars is limited and there will be no new CO2-emitting cars to replace the ones that go away, this ban of new sales will see these cars removed completely at some time, gradually. That's a phaseout.

> will see these cars removed completely at some time

You wish. Horses and Horse Carriages aren't even completely gone yet.

No country has banned the sale of horses though.

Usually when a year is given for a phaseout, that's when the phaseout is supposed to be completed, not the point where it begins. The current headline is misleading in that it suggests that ICE cars will be phased out by 2035, instead of that they will begin phasing them out starting in 2035.

> Usually when a year is given for a phaseout, that's when the phaseout is supposed to be completed,

Citation needed.

I see no evidence whatsoever that your claim is true, and it wouldn't even make sense, because with this kind of gradual phaseout you don't actually have control over when it is completed.

All the media reports of this particular phaseout report it exactly like the Reuter's article, so that's a lot of counterexamples right there.

Here's another one: "As a result, in 2009, the department announced the eventual phase out of the 1.5-inch-diameter fluorescent T12 tubes. The mandate said production of the tubes would have to cease after July 14, 2012. "

https://insights.regencylighting.com/the-phase-out-of-t12s-e...

Another one: https://www.epa.gov/ods-phaseout/phaseout-class-ii-ozone-dep...

Again, the only dates mentioned in the phase out are production and import bans.

Very different domain: "North Carolina legislation enacted on November 18 phases out the corporate income tax starting with tax years beginning in 2025,..."

So the date that is mentioned is the beginning of the phaseout, not the completion.

etc.

None of the examples you give refer to their subjects as <year> phaseout, and none list a year at all in their titles. All of them go out of their way to clarify that the dates they give are referring to the beginning of the process, which wouldn't be necessary if that were the default interpretation.

I'm going to miss really simple cars with barely any electronics in them.

In theory, electric cars are simpler. Fewer moving parts and all that. But _modern_ cars are full of electronic doodads. Theoretically there is nothing stopping someone from developing a barebones electric car.

Theoretically no, but practically the big manufacturers lobby to label smart electronics as safety features, so if you want to sell a simple car, you face the uphill battle of explaining why it scores low on safety ratings (which are mostly a checkbox-list of smart features).

TBH, things like airbags, power steering and automatic traction control do make the car safer.

Once you've used the necessary amounts of up-to-date electronic design techniques and components to build the battery management, motor controller and charging systems in your "barebones" EV, adding some multicolour lighting and a touchscreen is a tiny step.

A milkfloat is nearest thing to a "barebones" EV.

An electrical engine is a lot simpler than an internal combustion engine.

I don’t think that EV implies software overkill. I hope that some brands will carve out a niche for simple EVs with real buttons and low “smartness”.

>I don’t think that EV implies software overkill. I hope that some brands will carve out a niche for simple EVs with real buttons and low “smartness”.

Look to the TV sector, you can't buy a non 'smart' TV any more. I highly doubt it will be profitable for a non 'smart' electric car.

I guess the closest we have right now is the Citroen Ami?

I hope so but i'm not optimistic. I can't think of any electric car that doesn't have a horrific UI full of "smart" features i don't want and would pay to not have. Even a car that doesn't require subscriptions to turn on basic features seems like a very optimistic ask.

When I rented a VW e-Up, it barely had any smartness in it.

It will be difficult as big manufacturers will lobby to relabel smart features as safety features which will make it hard to sell a car with a low safety rating. (This is already happening, squeezing out the makers of cheaper cars.)

> I don’t think that EV implies software overkill. I hope that some brands will carve out a niche for simple EVs with real buttons and low “smartness”.

As of now EVs are synonymous with software overkill. Hence your hope that some brands WILL carve out a niche.

The WV e-up! was stupid simple; with the non-touch screen only being used for the parking camera and radio.

Sadly this is not the trend at all

For some definition of "simpler", sure. You could also look at it that an EV requires a functioning, efficient global system of engineering design, mineral extraction, and manufacture. There are very few countries that could claim they can make an EV 100% domestically, and the only one that comes to mind has been working very hard to put themselves in that position.

Like with CRTs, the only thing that simple about IC's is that the networks and systems have been developed over the last century or so. As an innate technology they're massively more complicated.

For most nations - even without the shit were destroying our home argument - EV's look like a better long-term proposition than having to buy oil from some of worst regimes on the planet on an ongoing basis to run a transport system.

>than having to buy oil from some of worst regimes on the planet

The current state of mineral and resource extraction and processing for EVs has a way to go before this argument holds water.

Someone already mentioned the, VW e-up! and it has a sibling called Skoda Citigo iV. They do belong to the "very tiny car" segment, but you can get them without any screen at all! Google some interior pictures. (Both not sold anymore, but you can find them used).

I think for a brand that does as simple and cheap cars as possible there's Dacia. They have the electric Dacia Spring which is also a small car. It does have a touch screen though. Only available in some select European countries.

Edit: Actually, the touch screen in the Spring is only the "Plus" version, so you can be touch-screen free! :) But the Plus version also has DC fast charging, so you probably want that anyway.

Yeah, the “smartness” is what I don’t like.

> An electrical engine is a lot simpler than an internal combustion engine.

Sure, but there is no electic car on the market that isn't massively complex with unnecessary electronics (that will fail over time).

Are there any new petroleum cars that are really simple and have little electronics - perhaps the ultra cheap, mostly Chinese city cars - but car manufacturers have been putting more and more electronics into vehicles long before electric cars

No. ICE engines vehicles used to be much simpler but they have gotten increasingly more complicated to meat emissions standards.

miata

You'd be talking 1970s or before, then? Anything from the 80s onwards has had plenty of electronics present. And generally been more reliable for it. Ftr I've owned and fixed hundreds of cars, and modern ones are much more reliable and need less servicing.

Even pre-1970, it's hard to think of any combustion engine being "really simple" tbh. They may be more repairable if you have access to spare parts or a machine shop, but constructing a new engine from scratch (or even a mid-level rebuild) is decidedly non-trivial even if you don't have any electronics at all.

> You'd be talking 1970s or before, then? Anything from the 80s onwards has had plenty of electronics present.

No, it's completely different in the last ~decade.

Certainly cars back into the 80s (some brands into the 70s) have electronics but they are completely independent and simple systems. You had individual wiring to every device and for the most part (usually 100%) independent circuits for every component.

This makes things very easy to diagnose with just a volt meter, easy to replace and even easy to completely rip out some subcomponent if you didn't care for it (or it became too expensive to repair). All the rest of the car was independent of that one component so everything keeps working.

This simple contruction is true into the 00s for most brands/models.

Current cars have integrated everything into a common bus and everything is controlled and monitored by opaque software that can't be diagnosed or fixed outside of factory tools.

For example even something as trivial as replacing the starting battery on newer BMWs (possibly other brands) requires special electronic tooling to reprogram the computer. That's just the tip of the iceberg, nearly nothing can be done in newer cars without access to factory electronic tools since everything is interconnected and hidden behind proprietary software control.

I have cars from the 80s, 90s and mid-00s and all of them require nothing more than a voltmeter to diagnose electrical problems. That's no longer true with new cars.

> modern ones are much more reliable and need less servicing

That's mostly true. But once they do require servicing, it's becoming nearly impossible to DIY so you are at the mercy of how long the factory cares to support your model.

I used to own a mid-00s (so not even that complex by current comparison) BMW and electrical glitches from the interconnected fragile electrical system were common. Even though I normally do everything in all my cars, there was nothing I could do without access to factory diagnostic tools so had to take it to the shop. Eventually the technicians there basically gave up, diagnosing things was so difficult that even with all the factory tooling they estimated tens of thousands in labor just to figure out the problems. I had to sell the car for scrap value since it was unfixable.

Give me simple cars from the 80s and 90s, I can keep those running forever myself.

If you buy a car with a gas engine in 2035 it'll be stuffed full of electronics too. This is independent of EV vs gas. If you want to keep driving your 2011 vehicle because it doesn't have a bunch of garbage in the infotainment system then you'll still be able to do that.

Agreed. Just bought a '89 Porsche — 100% buttons, couple of relays, one LCD clock. And actually a pure joy to drive, and repair.

Me too, but they were unsustainable. I really think when it comes to technology we need to think about sustainability first. We can't just look at something and think "ooh shiny", or "ooh convenient". We need to first ask about sustainability and trash it if it doesn't cross the first hurdle.

It's like our grandparents discovered an endless supply of food, built their lives around it and forgot how to farm. Our parents realised the supply wasn't actually endless, but it wouldn't run out in their lifetime so they just kept eating and becoming more dependent. They worked out how to eat less of the food, but they just ended up eating the same and getting fatter instead. We were born into a world utterly dependent on it but critically aware that it's running out and we need to stop. Sure, I'll miss the food too. Who wouldn't? But it's not coming back.

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